


Not All There

by Amemait



Category: Tin Man (2007), due South
Genre: GFY, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 11:09:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amemait/pseuds/Amemait
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes slipping doesn't mean that you fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It had taken weeks before the entire castle was investigated. The members of the resistance, despite having seen the man break down in front of them, were still almost superstitious about Zero’s chambers. It took Cain turning up to break down the door by force, sometime into the second week, to get people inside.  
  
Zero himself had wanted to come along (had screamed that they shouldn’t try without him, had snarled that there were “uh, traps, yeah! Traps!”, and had at last narrowed his eyes and muttered that Cain shouldn’t go, which rather cemented his going, really), but he was still being held At Her Majesty’s Pleasure in the dungeons. Needless to say, the Queen was not currently pleased with him.  
  
The doors turned out to be thicker and more soundproofed than other rooms’. The young longcoat spy, about 28 and an excellent field agent, or so Cain had been told upon meeting the young man with the cold gray eyes, had actually shivered as he’d looked at it.  
  
“Klaus?”  
  
“…He’d always tell us to leave him at this door.”  
  
Cain frowned.  
  
“Why-”  
  
Klaus shook his head.  
  
“He had a servant. Took one day to break him. A slipper, broken and kept in these rooms.”  
  
Cain didn’t think. He hit the other man.  
  
“Sir?” Klaus managed to splutter, staggering under the sheer force of the blow.  
  
“You left him? You didn’t think to come down here for more than a week!”  
  
“The room was always well-stocked! He LIVES here!”  
  
“He shouldn’t need to!” And Cain didn’t add that this wasn’t living if you were trapped, it was existing, and the difference between the two was astronomical.  
  
Still furious, but a contained fury now, he set to work breaking the door. Zero had hidden the keys somewhere, and they’ gotten lost in all the excitement. After a moment, Klaus joined him silently, head bowed at the knowledge of just how greatly this assignment had skewed his perceptions.  
  
They did not expect to be greeted by a tall man, wearing a longcoat jacket and the outfit worn by palace servants underneath, holding a gun in each hand. Klaus took a step backwards.  
  
“Who are you?” Cain demanded. If this was the servant-slipper, then he should be pleased to find that he wasn’t Zero.  
  
Not angry.  
  
“Where is Zero?”  
  
The words were satin over steel, and Cain blinked.  
  
“You were his servant, right? The one from the Other Side?” he asked, focusing on keeping his voice gentle, like he had done those years ago when his wife was both pregnant and feverish…  
  
Knuckles tightened on the twin weapons, and Cain fought the urge to just charge at the man and disarm him. He was clearly unhinged, but he stood with the ease of one who could use the guns in his hands, and was more than capable of fighting without them.  
  
“My name is Cain, I’m here to help…”  
  
The man blinked.  
  
“Wyatt Cain?”  
  
Cain nodded carefully, warily. The man faltered.  
  
“Zero mentioned you. He said…” a pause, an almost swallow. “He said that your file said you were an honourable man. He told me, before he left, that I would be able to trust you if you came.”  
  
The guns lowered.  
  
“Where is Ray?”  
  
\--  
  
He looked so lost. It wasn’t that the man was gaunt – on the contrary, even out of the darkened chambers that Zero had lived in, he was still an imposing figure.  
  
It was the lost expression in his eyes.  
  
Upon speaking more with the man, some things became apparent.  
  
Number one: He was indeed a Slipper, from a place called ‘Canada’. Both Amaho and the Princess DG confirmed this as a real place.  
  
Number two: He called himself ‘Fraser’, although he admitted this was not his given name.  
  
Number three: He would not divulge his given name. Amaho accepted this without a second’s hesitation, and advised Cain to do the same. Cain felt it would be slightly hypocritical of him not to do so anyway. Only his wife had ever actually called him ‘Wyatt’, anyway.  
  
Number four: Cain’s initial analysis had been entirely accurate. The man – Fraser – was unhinged.  
  
Number five: Honestly, as if Zero wasn’t really Zero!  
  
Number six: Although, come to think of it, that would explain why Zero himself would occasionally scream out “Chicago PD!”, amongst other entirely incomprehensible things, in his sleep.  
  
Number seven: Chicago was a city and DG had wanted to go there when she was a little girl because she thought it sounded cool.  
  
Number eight: What if Zero really was this Ray person?  
  
Number nine: Klaus needed to be reminded that he wasn’t undercover anymore.  
  
Number ten: Maybe Cain should have charged at Fraser in the first place anyway. It would have saved so much trouble…  
  
\--  
  
“Where is Ray?”  
  
It took them a day. They managed to obtain permission from the Queen (who only agreed after she’d seen the lost look in the man’s eyes for herself). But that in itself didn’t take the whole day.  
  
The man collapsed not too long after the initial questions. The doctor diagnosed him with fatigue and stress and malnourishment (or, as DG explained it quickly to a pre-op Glitch, who had asked: “He’s tired and worried and hungry”), and recommended that he be left in peace until he woke up, and then fed.  
  
It seemed as though he hadn’t slept since that last mission that Zero had gone on.  
  
“Ray…”  
  
\--  
  
Zero had his eyes closed, and he was sitting on the floor. Well, that’s what the guard had last seen him doing. By the time Cain reached him, however, he was leaning against a wall, watching. He’d had a haircut since he’d been dragged in, almost comatose. For a brief and endless moment, Cain had almost let Zero die, alone on that floor, but he’d sent the doctors in anyway. The hair was merely flat against his skull now, short and straight; without the flowing sidepart that had seemed practically immovable, he looked less the part of monster.  
  
“If you’ve hurt him, I swear, no metal bars will keep me from destroying you.”  
  
Cain wasn’t quite sure what he should say to that. He had no idea what he should say to the man who stood in front of him, mere metal bars and a painful history keeping them apart.  
  
“Your file said that her name was Adora.”  
  
This was, after all, the first time they’d actually shared a room, just them, since Zero had been taken out of the Suit.  
  
“I’m sorry for what happened to her.”  
  
How could he not know? But there was no lie in his eyes, and Raw had whispered the truth to him.  
  
“Well, what? Are you going to say anything? Say something, dammit!” Zero yelled, striding forward to grab at the bars that kept him in his cage.  
  
“Your friend was sick.”  
  
There was loss and pain and hurt in his eyes now, and it seemed like it couldn’t be hidden, and Cain could almost allow himself to feel sympathy for the face in front of him.  
  
“Where is he?”  
  
Almost.  
  
“He’s stable. Doc said he just needed rest and food.”  
  
“Told him I’d be fine, that I’d be coming home and that we’d both be able to go home at last. Damn fool Mountie, worried himself sick. Y’know, I always thought that was a wazzamathingie. Whosama. Simile,” Zero whispered sadly, sagging against the steel.  
  
“Metaphor?” suggested Cain, surprising himself.  
  
“Yeah. That.” Zero caught Cain’s eye again.  
  
“You get him better, y’hear me?”  
  
Again, there was nothing he could say to that.


	2. Chapter 2

“What’s a Mountie?”

Fraser would answer most of the questions that Cain asked him, but a strange look passed into his eyes as he ate his muglug.

“They’re a little like the old Tin Men of this world. They maintain the right.”

“I’ve spoken with Ze-Ray,” Cain began, and first cursed himself for almost slipping up, then for not managing to entirely hide the venom in his voice, and finally for the way that Fraser stopped eating to look straight at him.

“…He called you a Mountie.”

Fraser sighed, and it was so quiet and contained that Cain only knew it as a sigh by of the ripples that moved in the muglug.

“I was, once.”

“And now?” Cain prompted, watching the soup (Ambrose’s family recipe for muglug, and one of the cooks was still the same after more than sixteen years, of all things), because that seemed to be more indicative of what Fraser was feeling than anything else about him at that moment.

“Now I’m here.”

The muglug wobbled slightly in hands that were not quite steady enough.

“What will happen when you go back?”

“I don’t know.”

The soup wobbled some more before Fraser set it down gently on the bedside table.

“I’d like to see Ray now, please.”

And after that, Cain could not refuse.

\--

Raw watched over Zero as he slept.

Or rather, pretended to sleep.

It was a good ten minutes before Zero finally gave up, snapped his eyes open, and then glared at the Viewer.

“Okay. Lion-person-thing. That’s creepy.”

Raw blinked, but said nothing.

This was not Zero.

Well, he knew that already. It was, frankly, obvious; even DG’s Toto had looked at him and said that this was not Zero, and he had only really seen him as a dog, save for a few moments in the camp.

Perhaps the animal in him gave other insights?

But just as Toto had said that Zero didn’t smell like death the way he should, Raw could tell that he didn’t feel of senseless death. Even from such a distance.

No, that didn’t mean that he didn’t have the ghosts of deaths about him. But the strange other Slipper also had ghosts about him. Quiet ones, ones that bespoke of loss more than they did pain.

This Zero-slipper was all aching pain.

“Yeah, seriously creeped out here.”

“Raw knows.”

That certainly hushed the man. He shut up, like Kalm did when a hand went to his shoulder in the midst of a nightmare. Shaking power and still body.

An endless moment, then Zero spoke again.

“You know, huh? You mind telling them?”

“Hrm…”

Zero stared into Raw’s eyes, all at once painfully open and entirely closed off. Raw merely looked at him.

Finally, Zero looked away, rolled over and, Raw assumed, closed his eyes against looking at the blank wall.

Raw waited another few minutes, then left.

\--

It was almost absurd. Fraser was just not well enough for the doctor to let him leave, despite Fraser's own assurances to the contrary, and a comment or so to the tune that he’d tracked criminals through snow under far worse conditions (and when Zero had heard of this, from some guard who had been told to take a week off, he had spent two hours with his mattress propped against the wall, delivering punch after punch, entirely unaware of his surrounds).

Fraser was also too determined to let Cain wriggle out of his split-second decision. It wasn’t that he cried, or that he openly displayed emotion (Azkadelia was in the room now, and that may have had something to do with the way his entire face shut itself off). It was simply that when the witch-queen-turned-princess turned to leave, he shot Cain a look that managed to be filled with hurt for all of a split-second; really quite impressive for somebody whose face was still carefully blank.

So no, there was no way to gracefully bow out of this promise.

“His name is Ray.”

And that was the other thing. He wouldn’t budge on the naming issue. He spoke that Ray was no longer undercover, that he needed to be ‘Ray’ again, and that calling him ‘Zero’ just wasn’t helping.

Cain humoured him in pure desperation, not because he actually and honestly believed what Fraser said. Not entirely.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; it was that what he said was absurd. And what the hell was a ‘submarine’, anyway? Sounded a bit like it might be a U-boot, only larger. And those were only legends; men living under the water in a hunk of metal and ruin? That was insane. Particularly the bit about the fires. Honestly, as if you could light a fire under water.

It certainly didn’t help that Ambrose was taking up most of DG’s time. She might have been helpful; another person who didn’t quite belong in the O.Z. (she could deny it all she liked, but they could all hear the wistfulness in her voice as she spoke of Kansas).

It was obvious the trip wasn’t going to happen today.

Raw was keeping an eye on Fraser. Truth told, Cain still didn’t quite trust the man. He was still Zero’s, and that was just plain strange (DG had merely shrugged when this concept was brought up. Cain suspected that things were really different in the Other Side). But they were whispering, and Fraser seemed truly delighted to learn new things, even if he had to do so entirely from the comfort (or discomfort from Fraser’s point of view, Cain supposed) of a bed.

But then Raw left, and Fraser looked at the door with his eyes closed. Which was insane, Cain knew, because with your eyes closed you couldn’t see, but he remembered something his least-favourite instructor had once said; when you don’t see, you look more.

Fraser’s eyebrows twitched upwards.

“Cain. You wanted to speak with me?”

No he didn’t.

“Yeah.”

And before he knew it himself, he was sitting in the chair that Raw had just vacated, and Fraser was smiling at him, his face crinkling at the corners of his eyes and mouth like Cain was his best friend in the world, but his eyes themselves were like a cold blue flame.

Cain tried not to shudder.

“You don’t trust me, and while I must admit that I haven’t done anything yet to earn your trust, I would like to know why you are so uncomfortable around me in the first instance.”

Cain blinked, and ran that through a mental translation (years of official dinners, long ago, had taught him to see through waffle to the double-talk beneath. But that had been a lifetime ago…), before speaking, carefully.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Fraser, it’s that…”

He trailed off, and repressed another shudder at Fraser’s eyes (a hidden fire, hidden depths; like blue sea filled with monsters and legends; like blue sky and Mobats headed straight towards him…), and gave up on his original plans for that sentence.

“It’s that… it’s that I don’t trust you.”

“Ah.”

The silence stretched out, and Cain considered his options.

“Ray said that you were trustworthy.”

Cain nodded. Familiar ground, they’d covered this one before.

“Ray also said that you wouldn’t trust easily.”

Fraser looked away.

“You think me a spy.”

Cain glared suddenly.

“I do not think you are a spy,” and the words were tightly controlled; he had no idea how he managed to not snarl them.

Fraser looked back at him, and smiled lightly. A quick flash of light, and dear Suns, if that was what Zero had been exposed to, then he could not possibly be evil, because it made Cain want to believe in himself, believe that he was good, and that everything would always be wonderful and that he had a heart and the power to make all the right changes, and-

The smile went away, but Fraser’s eyes were no longer flames, no longer danger; they were calm and soft and a light breeze on a long march through forests.

“I thank you for that trust, Cain.”

It was too unnerving to be there any longer.

\--

“You feel he is no threat, Mr. Cain?”

Cain looked at a spot precisely one inch to the left and three inches above where the Queen’s eyes were.

“No ma’am. He is, however, very insistent upon rejoining Zero.”

“Ray.”

Cain blinked.

“Ray,” Amaho repeated, lounging against the wall. “It might help if you remembered that, Cain.”

Cain’s eyes narrowed infinitesimally. The Queen gave Amaho an indulgent smile.

“Raw informs me that the man we have in our dungeons is not a man capable of killing in cold blood.”

“Has he touched him?” Cain could not quite control his outburst of anger ( _he killed my wife!_ ), but the Queen merely tilted her head to the right, and waited until Cain’s breathing was more under control.

“Not as yet. But he has touched Mr. Fraser. Raw assures me that just as Mr. Fraser is no threat, neither does he perceive our prisoner to be a threat. In fact, Raw says that Mr. Fraser trusts our prisoner completely. Any injuries that were known to have been sustained were… consensual.”

“They had to make it look good for everybody else,” Amaho translated, an easy smile on his face.

“In any case,” the Queen continued, as though she hadn’t heard her husband speak. “Mr. Fraser has my permission to meet with the prisoner known as ‘Zero’, _as soon as he is well enough to do so_. Is that clear, Mr. Cain?”

“Perfectly, your Majesty.”


End file.
